Weekly Writing Prompt: 8/14-8/20 (2016)

Is it still the 20th? Yes? Great! I wrote a thing.

Amanda posted this week’s prompt on Sunday, and I had so many ideas, too many ideas. But you know, I’ve only missed one week since I started doing this, and I wasn’t going to let this one elude me. I wasn’t, I tell you!

So, in honor of my own tenacity, let’s have the answer to the prompt: I told you that I was no good for you.

It’s an Exalted prompt, for the tabletop game. You all get to meet my namesake, the first long-term character I made and never put down.

---

No Good Choice

He had told them. He had warned them. When Mars had crafted his Exaltation, she had taken from the world a great battle, one of the greatest, as she had done for each of those who bore her grace. Maybe it had happened, or was happening, or was yet to happen, but it was a great battle, and now it no longer existed in Creation.

It existed in him.

An Exaltation burned through blood and bone, erasing impurities. That was true for every Exaltation, even Sidereals. But Sidereals were born woven into Fate, and people looked for them intensely, so to not miss their birth. They were squirreled away, lost children of three-day mothers, and raised safe in Yu Shan. It was destiny.

He hadn’t had that.

Before the war with the Primordials, the Five Maidens had looked into the loom and saw the path of the world. As the Unconquered Sun and Luna, they had been given three hundred. And they had used for that terrible war only a third of their allotment.

Save a secret among themselves, for what were secrets among sisters?

They took five, and they sat them outside of Loom, beyond Fate, beyond Destiny. They were crafted but not put into the cycle, daggers in the dark and hidden paths, quiet pleasures and secrets upon secrets, endings to come in time. A complete Circle. A hidden circle.

That was him. The battle Mars had plucked from Creation without anyone else’s knowledge, without anyone else noticing but her and her sisters, the same way they shared secrets among themselves and told no others, even the rest of the Incarnae. He didn’t think they had known of the existence of them at all, until one of their own had stumbled upon him.

He’d been born in the final years of the First Age, before the Usurpation. His parents had been Lunars, two bright moons, the eyes of Luna. Both warriors in their own right, accomplished, dangerous. They had named him true, despite no knowledge of the future, or of dangers yet to come, and they had raised him, for his Exaltation was a secret not to be tracked, and so no one had come to spirit him away.

He Who Stalks Like Thunder and Strikes Like Lightning.

But now he was old, and accomplished, and the name was ever more true as the years of experience drug on. He was the Maiden’s blade in Creation, one of the most deployed. He was friend and companion to the Little Sister. He was lethal, dangerous, a wandering soldier, and he’d warned them to try to save their lives before they’d ever drawn their blades:

Turn away and forget you saw me. I am no good for you.

---

Whee! There it is. Very nice. Let’s take a quick look at who else did the prompt before I floof off to bed, yeah?

Other Responses
Kayla’s | Amanda’s | WriterNotWriter’s

There it is. That’s it for the week, methinks. And now, I’m off to saw logs.

–Natasha

Twitter | Tumblr | NaNo Page | Ao3 | Buy Me a Coffee